HONESTY IN FILMMAKING
The sixteenth interview of the FemGems in the Arts series features the filmmakers, Asia Dér and Sári Haragonics.
ASIA DÉR graduated as a documentary director from the DOCnomads MA program. Her graduation film was nominated for the best short film at the Hungarian Film Festival. Currently, she is doing her doctoral studies about how the relationship between the director and the main character affects the dramaturgy and the psyche in long documentaries. She is working on her second feature length documentary, I HAVEN’T DIED, about a middle-aged man who is aiming to face his true self afters surviving pancreatic cancer. She participated with her films at ZagrebDox Pro, DOCCIRCLE, and the Docu Rough Cut Boutique. She is a presidium member of the Hungarian Documentary Association.
SÁRI HARAGONICS graduated from the University of Theatre and Film Arts, Budapest with an MA in documentary film directing. She is also an honours graduate in media production from the University of Bedfordshire in the UK. Her graduation film, COMING FACE, is about what inner springs one can still find inside the family when overcoming pain and accepting the absence of a mother. The film has been screened at several festivals and won the ZOOM-IN competition at the Verzio International Documentary Festival in 2015. Sári continues that path in her next documentary-feature, DON’T WORRY, SÁRI! about the absence of mothers in her family and how affects their family dynamics. She recently started her Doctoral studies researching how participatory video can affect our social relations — focusing on underprivileged children and youngsters.
I met Asia and Sári in July 2019 during a session of Docu Rough Cut Boutique (organized by the Balkan Documentary Center) in Sofia, where they presented a work-in-progress cut of their intimate and raw documentary film, HER MOTHERS. I was really impressed by their genuine sensitivity towards truthfulness in cinema and the way they naturally react to everything that feels false or untrue. Asia and Sári dive deep into social and political subjects while revealing the existential dimensions of human faith. Both of them are interested in borderline situations and dysfunctional families. In treating these difficult subjects, their focus lies in the examining, and in the psychological mechanisms, social dynamics, and individual or collective actions and attitude. Striving for simplicity, universality, honesty and authenticity in filmmaking helps them find the way throughout all of the doubts and difficulties in the creative process.
HER MOTHERS (selected at HotDocs Film Festival) is a wonderful example of a gentle and truthful documentary film which observes the complexity of intimate and family issues in a larger socio-political frame: As Hungary’s political climate becomes increasingly radicalized, Virág, a former green politician, loses faith in the democratic parliament of Hungary and retires from politics. She and her musician partner Nóra decide to adopt a child and focus on building a family together. With a sensitive lens and close access, they follow the two women through their long and ultimately successful adoption process to bring home their young daughter. But tensions begin to rise between the two as Virág thrives in her role as a mother and Nóra struggles to find her place within the family. As the rising tides of right wing propaganda in Hungary begin to overflow into their family, their lives hit a boiling point and they must face the difficult decision of whether to leave their country behind.
Are you more interested in social and political subjects or rather in revealing the existential dimensions of the individual human faith?
Asia: In documentary films which I love and which I’m aiming to make, these two walk hand in hand. While filming a person, I try to understand her/him more deeply, which includes getting to know the social, political, psychological, and emotional context of the protagonists. These are all layered there behind a personal story.
Sari: I’m more interested in very human stories, generally motherhood and family dynamics. But all these stories have a social aspect to them as well; we just have to dig them out.
Do you need to have a very personal motivation to start working on a project?
Sаri: Yes, I need to have personal motivation. There’s usually a reason why I want to know more about the topic, or the people I’m filming about, or a deeper reason why I think it’s important to tell their story.
Asia: Definitely, even if I’m not necessarily aware of it at the beginning of the filming.
How did you come up with this subject? How did the two of you complement each other while working together on a documentary film?
Asia + Sari: This subject came from more of a social interest and then it became personal through the process. We faced the fact that there are around 100 so-called ‘rainbow families’ living in Hungary as kind of outlaws. When we met Virag and Nora we knew right away we would like to tell their story. As for the filming, we did everything equally. Directing, writing scripts, going to pitching sessions, etc. On set, it was only the two of us, Asia did the camera and Sári did sound.
How did you approach the protagonists? Had you known them well before you decided to do a film about them?
Sari: I’ve first met Virág in London about 15 years-ago. I was 20 at the time, living my first few months in a different country. She was living in a squat back then with really cool, easy-going friends and that made a big impression on me. Then in 2015 our common friend told us that Virág and Nora are waiting for adoption and that we should speak to them.
Asia: We met them in a café and explained to them very carefully and honestly how the filming of a character-driven documentary goes. We wanted them to know that it’s not an easy commitment, that we will be there with them for a long time, in the most intimate situations of the most important period of their lives. They had to think about it a bit but luckily, they soon agreed to be the protagonists.
How did you manage to convince them to allow you into their intimate space and make them feel comfortable enough to share their personal fears and hopes about their parenthood experience? For what amount of time did you follow the protagonists? How many days did you shoot?
Asia + Sari: The filming period was almost 3 years. We had about 75 filming days. The first couple of shooting days we were just getting to know each other, laughing a lot over this weird situation we found ourselves in. We talked a lot over a coffee, without turning on the camera.
But we became friends quite quickly with Nóra and Virág, their family and friends, which helped us to feel comfortable together even with a large microphone and a camera in hand. Many times, we stayed in their house overnight, had a glass of wine and long conversations about life.
How did you work on the script of this film? Did you somehow intervene into the real-life story in order to create a dramatic film structure?
Asia + Sari: The script kept changing as the protagonists had to face newer challenges as time went by. Quite soon we decided that the film will have 3 parts: waiting for adoption, becoming a family, and the process of moving abroad.
We were focusing on the questions raised by forming a family, becoming mothers. It was interesting to see the special difficulties a gay couple faces when adopting and realizing that most of the processes are no different from heterosexual parenthood or giving birth.
We didn’t make big interventions in dramaturgy or on set, but sometimes to be able to understand the storyline, we changed the order of certain events. Once we happened to ask Nóra and Virág to repeat a conversation about a certain topic that they discussed already, when we were not there.
How long was the editing period, what was your biggest challenge during the process?
Asia + Sari: The editing period was a bit longer than a year; it was an intense time of our lives. We were struggling a lot how to balance the dramaturgy between the personal and the political in order to have the story of the family in the foreground and at the same time make the context understandable for foreign audiences.
What were the most crucial decisions you made during your work on this film?
Sári: To leave out some of our favorite scenes. There were three amazing scenes, which all meant that they could adopt a little girl. But in the film, we had to choose one, because the three strong scenes at the end were weakening each other. Also, we had a beautiful long scene of Nóra and Meli packing up the house. It was a very touching, really sweet scene and told a lot about Meli and Nora’s relationship but still it didn’t fit in the final version.
Asia: There is a scene where Nóra is feeling really down due to many reasons and in a moment of despair, she says that a family with two mothers won’t work. It was a very honest moment, she needed to say this fear out loud, to get it out of her system. We discussed a lot if it should stay in the film or not; especially in a society which is already hostile against rainbow families, it could cause harm. But at the end, we were sure it has to stay in the film, because this kind of self-doubt and fear are very normal for any new parents. Nóra and Virág supported us in this decision.
It seems that your characters made the decision to move to Austria because of the deteriorating attitude towards gay people in their country. How does that hostile political speech affect the attitude and the mindset of the people in Hungary?
Asia + Sari: Unfortunately, it is very normal in the Hungarian political discourse to find certain minorities and make them enemies of the state. This happened in the past years to refugees or the liberal thinkers and artists, and they also tried to put the stigma on gay people. But we think this time the propaganda failed. “People of Hungary are not at as homophobic as the government wants them to be” — sayz Virág.
Still, just recently, the goalkeeper from the national football team posted his support to all kinds of families on Facebook and now he has to face thousands of hateful comments, even the Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán lectured him publicly about his place as a football player.
How did you finance your project? Did you receive a grant from your home country? You have been selected for many workshops — how did they help you in the development of your film?
Asia + Sari: In Hungary we only applied once to the incubator program of the National Film Fund which supports first-time directors, though we didn’t get funded. Although we were working without any funding for three years, we had great mental support from our producers and each other. That is one reason we recommend working as two directors on a film, especially if it’s your first one. The development and post-production workshops we took part in were extremely helpful. We met supporting and caring tutors and got the necessary feedback and motivation to continue our work. Just to name a few: to our mentors at Dunadock, Zagrebdox pro, Docu Rough Cut Boutique or DocLeipzig, we will be eternally grateful.
The film has had a very successful international festival circuit. Did you have a special festival strategy? How was the film received in Hungary?
Asia + Sari: Our sales agent, Syndicado, decided on the festival strategy. The reception from the Hungarian audience was beyond our expectations. All kinds of people reached out to us to share how touched they were by the story of this family.
What do you think about contemporary cinema? There are trends and successful models, but what does it take to create something really deep and brave, which speaks with a strong and unique voice?
Sari: I strongly believe that to be able to create something really deep, you need to be really honest. You, as a director. If your character is not honest enough, but you are, you can still save your film. The other main criteria for me is that you have to be very ethical to your characters. That will also make the movie strong and it’s also part of the honesty I’ve talked about. I think that most of the time it helps if you have obstacles during your filmmaking process. Either that you can’t film something, you don’t have money or maybe you’ve missed an important scene. To me these are creative obstacles, which then force you to find a solution in order to move your project forward. You have to think a bit more outside the box, and if you keep honest and true to your characters, it usually ends up as something better than you ever imagined.
Asia: I’ve recently watched ACASA, MY HOME and NOMADLAND, which are both incredible films. You just have to face those tough human fates, there are no shiny filmmaking techniques to make it easier for you. I love these plain, direct films like the ones from the Dardennes Brothers or most of the Romanian movies. All the films (both fiction and documentary) have a huge impact on me where I feel that the director is really deeply connected to her/his topic, and is able to make me care as well. This deep commitment just shines through the screen and pulls you in.
The Hungarian cinema is in a forward march. What is the governmental policy in the fields of film and culture?
Asia + Sari: In Hungary, if you want to make a film of any kind and length, you have to apply to the The National Film Fund. There are no other reasonable funds to consider, which makes the competition very high. In 2018 the Film Fund introduced a tax incentive system; film productions may be eligible for a tax rebate equivalent to 30% of the direct film production costs incurred in connection with the Hungarian shooting in or outside of Hungary. This system boosted the Hungarian film industry and attracted many foreign productions, mainly American crews.
What are you both currently working on?
Asia: I’m editing now my second feature film about a life-loving, successful gallery owner, who gets pancreatic cancer, and against all odds he survives. He tries to create a new life, living more consciously about himself, but habits are not easy to change even if you get a second chance after facing death. Another project is a collective documentary project about the freeSZFE movement which we are both part of. The film follows how students and teachers of the Hungarian Film school are fighting for their autonomy.
Sari: I’m also in the editing stage of my second feature film, which is about me and my family. It is a personal account on whether anybody can be replaced. My mother died 10 years-ago and I feel obliged to fulfill her role in our family. The film is dealing with that question through our family dynamics: the story of three male relatives from three different generations. Right now, we are experimenting with the style and my role in the film; we use situative scenes as well as dreams, voice messages, and many archive footages.
We wish Asia and Sári good luck on their current projects and will keep an eye on their work as we are certain that the best is yet to come for them.
This portrait is the 16th one of the FemGems in the Arts series, proudly part of FemGems, a labor of love boosting female entrepreneurship.
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